LinkedIn goes deeper into puzzle games with Tango, following success of Queens
A man opens the LinkedIn social network app on his smartphone at the breakfast table in Berlin on July 5, 2024.
Alicia Windzio | Picture Alliance | Getty Images
Every morning, Emily Ritter spends 15 minutes in bed checking her Instagram, Messages, Slack and Strava apps and playing The New York Times’ Connections and Strands games on her phone. Recently, LinkedIn has been part of the mix.
Ritter, a marketing executive at San Francisco-based startup Front, discovered a logic puzzle called Queens about two months ago through a promotion on LinkedIn, which is best known as the place where professionals connect and recruiters find talent.
“It’s just kind of a fun brainteaser,” Ritter said. “It’s a way to do something sort of relaxing, but in an engaging way.”
LinkedIn, which Microsoft acquired for $27 billion in 2016, rolled out its first three games in May, and Queens has emerged as the hottest of the trio.
On Tuesday, the company launches game number four, and it’s going deeper into logic puzzles with a title called Tango. In the game, a user is presented with a grid, and a few squares are filled in with a sun or a moon. It’s up to the player to fill in each remaining square with a sun or a moon, based on a few rules.
While LinkedIn consistently ranks as a top 100 app on iOS in the U.S., it’s below other social apps like TikTok, Reddit, Snapchat and X as well as Meta services such as Facebook and Instagram, according to industry researcher Sensor Tower.
Games represent a form of content that, when done right, keep people coming back. And it’s a market that Microsoft knows well. The company introduced its first Xbox console in 2001, and now has a games business generating $22 billion in annual revenue following the purchase of Activision Blizzard a year ago.
Yet gaming wasn’t a part of LinkedIn for the first seven years after the acquisition, which was Microsoft’s biggest ever until the Activision deal. Daniel Roth, LinkedIn’s editor-in-chief, says the games are designed to be played a little bit each day, perhaps when the day begins or as a short interlude between projects. Hopefully, they’ll spark conversations with colleagues and industry peers.
“You start with your game score and you move on to other areas,” Roth said.
It’s a familiar model. The New York Times offers eight games, and made a splash in the market in 2022 with the purchase of viral word game Wordle. The newspaper publisher saw tens of millions of new users and added subscribers after the acquisition.
LinkedIn, which generates revenue from recruiting services and advertising, isn’t planning to charge people to play its games, a spokesperson said. In the fiscal year that ended on June 30, LinkedIn generated $16 billion in revenue, or about 7% of Microsoft’s total.
The unit “continues to see accelerated member growth and record engagement,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told analysts on the company’s July earnings call, months after membership crossed the 1 billion mark.
LinkedIn has been busy this year. It has built artificial intelligence features to help job seekers and students of its online courses. It’s been bringing a TikTok-like video tab to the LinkedIn mobile app.
And LinkedIn released its eighth annual list of the top 50 large companies to work at in the U.S.
Fun is a key part of the best workplaces, whether it be through banter, recreational sports or a happy hour, said Lakshman Somasundaram, the LinkedIn product management director who leads up games.
“It’s not just meetings and documents,” he said. “It’s important to us that LinkedIn reflects what the world’s best workplaces feel like.”
In September, LinkedIn surveyed around 900 members, and 83% said it was their favorite game the site offered, the spokesperson said.
Queens requires players to drop one crown emoji in each row and one in each column of a grid, a format that’s “a little bit sudoku-like,” said Thomas Snyder, the game’s architect. Snyder, a scientist formerly with Freenome and Adaptive Biotechnologies, won the 2018 World Puzzle Championship.
‘Sooner give up my left arm’
Joe Weinman, a former AT&T executive in New Jersey, has solved Queens for 46 days in a row. His streak would be at 90, but he forgot to play one day, he said in a LinkedIn message.
“I’d sooner give up my left arm than give up Queens,” he wrote, adding that he used to be on LinkedIn once a week.
And now there’s a place for Weinman and other addicts to congregate. In July Somasundaram started posting daily videos that reveal solutions to Queens puzzles on a dedicated page for the game. The videos garner hundreds of comments.
Somasundaram said he plans to produce videos about Tango.
Ritter has watched some of the Queens videos. She said she’s learned how to get through the puzzles relatively quickly.
“I guess I have just sort of figured out some of the tricks,” Ritter wrote in a LinkedIn message, adding that she would probably enjoy new challenging games.
When LinkedIn decided to launch a new logic game, employees came up with a few principles and brought them to Snyder. He sent back samples, and LinkedIn team members suggested additions, said LinkedIn games editor Paolo Pasco, who has constructed crossword puzzles for The New York Times.
In Tango, the objective is to get each row and column of the grid to have the same number of suns and moons. No more than two of a kind can be next to each other vertically or horizontally. An equal sign between two squares means the two must be the same, and an X between them requires the symbols to be opposites.
It’s a simple concept, but the puzzles get harder as the week progresses, just like The New York Times’ crossword puzzle.
LinkedIn promotes its games on its homepage and in the app’s My Network tab. But 40% of the people who play come in through a link, which might have been shared in a conversation or a post. After completing a game, LinkedIn makes it easy to copy your score and a link so you can send the information to connections or publish a post.
Between the links and the daily videos, people are coming back for more. LinkedIn’s App Store ranking tends to dip on the weekends, according to Sensor Tower, suggesting less usage when people aren’t at work.
“Professionals are playing games regularly, even on the weekends,” the spokesperson said.
WATCH: New data shows the labor market may not be as resilient as previously thought
A former EU commissioner has hit back after receiving a U.S. visa ban for alleged censorship.
The Trump administration imposed visa bans on Thierry Breton, a former European Union commissioner behind the Digital Services Act (DSA), and four anti-disinformation campaigners, accusing them of censoring U.S. social media platforms.
“The State Department is taking decisive action against five individuals who have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to censor, demonetize, and suppress American viewpoints they oppose,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement.
He added that “these radical activists and weaponized NGOs have advanced censorship crackdowns by foreign states—in each case targeting American speakers and American companies.”
As such, their entry to the U.S. has “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences,” he said.
“Based on these determinations, the Department has taken steps to impose visa restrictions on agents of the global censorship-industrial complex who, as a result, will be generally barred from entering the United States.”
Breton, who served as EU commissioner between 2019 and 2024, wrote on X: “As a reminder: 90% of the European Parliament — our democratically elected body — and all 27 Member States unanimously voted the DSA.”
“To our American friends: “Censorship isn’t where you think it is.””
It comes as President Donald Trump continues to ramp up travel restrictions for foreign visitors and criticizes Europe.
Rubio did not identify who his department had taken action against, however Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy Sarah Rogers later did so on X.
Josephine Ballon, the co-leader of HateAid who serves on Germany’s Advisory Council of the Digital Services, was among those working on anti-disinformation campaigns to receive sanctions. Her co-leader Anna-Lena von Hodenberg was also affected. CNBC has reached out to Ballon and Von Hodenberg for comment.
The bans are part of efforts to enforce what Rogers refers to as a “red line” for the U.S. and the “extraterritorial censorship of Americans.”
In an interview with GB news on Dec. 4, Rogers took aim at the U.K.’s Online Safety Act (OSA), saying the law was being applied extraterritorially, accounting for U.S. citizens’ speech about U.S. politics on U.S.-based platforms.
Europe’s DSA and the U.K.’s OSA are among only a handful of pieces of legislation designed to keep the power of Big Tech in check and improve safety for children online.
The DSA forces tech giants like Google and Meta to police illegal content more aggressively, or face hefty fines, while the OSA law requires age verification on adult sites and a number of other platforms.
Technology
Waymo will update driverless fleet after San Francisco blackout to improve navigation during outages
A Waymo car is halted on the road amid a power outage in San Francisco, California, U.S., December 20, 2025, in this screengrab obtained from a social media video.d
Reuters
Three days after a blackout in San Francisco caused Waymo to pause its driverless car service, the Alphabet-owned company said it’s updating its fleet so its vehicles are better prepared to respond during future outages.
“We’ve always focused on developing the Waymo Driver for the world as it is, including when infrastructure fails,” the company said in a blog post late Tuesday.
Power outages began early afternoon on Saturday in San Francisco and peaked roughly two hours later, affecting about 130,000 customers, according to Pacific Gas and Electric. As of Sunday morning, about 21,000 customers remained without power. PG&E said a fire at a substation resulted in “significant and extensive” damage.
With stoplights and traffic signals not functioning, the city was hit with widespread gridlock. Videos shared on social media appeared to show multiple Waymo vehicles stalled in traffic in various neighborhoods.
“We directed our fleet to pull over and park appropriately so we could return vehicles to our depots in waves,” Waymo said in Tuesday’s blog post. “This ensured we did not further add to the congestion or obstruct emergency vehicles during the peak of the recovery effort.”
San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie said in an update on X Saturday evening that police officers, fire crews, parking control officers and city ambassadors were deployed across affected neighborhoods.
Waymo said that it’s analyzing the event, and is taking three “immediate steps.”
The first involves “fleet-wide updates” to give vehicles “more context about regional outages,” so cars can take more decisive actions at intersections. The company said it’s also improving its “emergency response protocols,” and is coordinating with Mayor Lurie’s team in San Francisco to better collaborate in emergency preparedness. Finally, Waymo said it’s updating its first responder training “as we discover learnings from this and other widespread events.”
In addition to the Bay Area, Waymo currently serves paid rides to the public in and around Austin, Texas, Phoenix, Atlanta and Los Angeles. The company recently crossed an estimated 450,000 weekly paid rides, and said in December it had served 14 million trips in 2025, putting it on pace to end the year at more than 20 million trips total since launching in 2020.
“Backed by 100M+ miles of fully autonomous driving experience and a record of improving road safety, we are undaunted by the opportunity to challenge the status quo of our roads, and we’re proud to continue serving San Franciscan residents and visitors,” the company said in Tuesday’s blog.
— CNBC’s Lora Kolodny and Jennifer Elias contributed to this report.
WATCH: Waymo service resumes after errors cause issues in San Francisco
Direxion signage at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York, US, on Monday, Dec. 22, 2025. The holiday-shortened week started with gains in stocks amid a broad advance that saw a continuation of the bullish momentum on Wall Street.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Motive, a company with software for managing corporate trucks and drivers, on Tuesday filed for an initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “MTVE.”
The paperwork puts Motive among a fast-growing group of tech companies looking to go public in 2026. Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX have all reportedly considered making their shares widely available for trading next year.
Motive is smaller, reporting a $62.7 million net loss on $115.8 million in revenue in the third quarter. The loss widened from $41.3 million in the same quarter of 2024, while revenue grew about 23% year over year. The company had almost 100,000 clients at the end of September.
Ryan Johns, Obaid Khan and Shoaib Makani started Motive in 2013, originally under the name Keep Truckin. Makani, the CEO, is Khan’s brother-in-law.
Investors include Alphabet’s GV, Base10 Partners, Greenoaks, Index Ventures, Kleiner Perkins and Scale Venture Partners.
Motive’s AI Dashcam device for detecting unsafe driving “has prevented 170,000 collisions and saved 1,500 lives on our roads,” Makani wrote in a letter to investors. Most revenue comes from subscriptions, although Motive does sell replacement hardware and professional services.
The San Francisco company changed its name to Motive in 2022, and as of Sept. 30, it employed 4,508 people. Motive employs 400 full-time data annotators who apply labels that are meant to enhance artificial intelligence models.
Motive has ongoing patent-infringement litigation with competitor Samsara, which went public in 2021 and today has a $22 billion market capitalization.
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